Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy (55 page)

“Nooo.”
Clutching her Savage in one tight fist, Ellie stamped a foot,
then pushed Mina’s snout away when the dog turned a worried look.
“Please don’t make me. I want to stay with you. Why can’t I?”

“Ellie, honey.” While very bright, the moon kept ducking in and
out of scudding high clouds, and he was having a hard time seeing
her face. Crouching, Tom ducked his head, trying to catch her eyes.
Go easy; she’s grown up a lot, but she’s still only eight.
“Look at me. You
have to listen. It won’t be safe here.”

“But I don’t want to go with
them.
” She waved an arm in the general direction of the wagons parked in the hospice’s lot. From here,
the wagons would head north on an old logging road that could be
easily blocked once they were gone. The air was filled with the clatter of hooves on icy asphalt, the anxious whimpers and yips of the
remaining dogs, and the piping exclamations and questions from the
children. Most were under twelve and being hustled to one of two
waiting wagons. To Tom’s left, a bald kid with more piercings than
a pincushion was boosting an egg-headed boy onto a flatbed where
Sarah, a slender girl with a touch of a limp, waited.

“You know Jayden,” he said.
“That’s not what I mean. I should stay. I can help,” Ellie said. “So
can Mina.” At the sound of her name, the dog’s tail whisked. “We
shouldn’t split up, Tom. We only just . . .”
“I know, honey.” He leaned forward a little to make himself heard
over the axes biting trees and handsaws buzzing through trunks. Once
the children were away, the trees would be felled to prevent Finn’s
men from using the road. A large force would have to bushwhack
miles out of its way to follow. If Finn was up to chasing anyone. Tom
was betting against it. “But I have to stay. If you’re still here, I’ll worry
about you, and then I won’t be able to do my job.”
“But why does it have to be you? Why can’t somebody else stay?”
“Chris
is
staying.” He wasn’t wild about that, but Chris wouldn’t
back down:
Your plan, my town, and you’ll need help.
Best not to fight
it, though. The first chance he got, he’d send Chris packing. “I’m the
only one who can do this, Ellie. This is the way I can keep you safe.”
At the growing thunder in her expression, he cupped her face in his
hands. “You and Alex were the best things to ever happen to me. I
thought I’d lost you, and then there you were, like this miracle. I was
so happy I thought I was going to burst. I would do anything for you.
I know this is hard, but please do this for me.”
“Tom.”
Ellie blinked furiously. “I don’t have anything to give you
to keep you safe. Chris has my good-luck charm. I don’t have anything else.”
“Oh honey.” He kissed first her right palm and then her left before
pressing her small hands to his chest. “You’re right here. That’s all I
need.”
“But what about Alex?”
He worked around the tightness in his throat. “She’s there, too.
She’ll always be.”
“But I want her for real, Tom. Promise we’ll look for her, together?”
She raised her streaming face. “Please. Cross your heart and hope to
die?”
For the second time in less than five minutes, he lied. “Cross my
heart and—” He saw Chris, downslope, running their way. The boy’s
body language was enough.
This is it.
“You have to go, honey.” Scooping Ellie into his arms, he
jogged to Sarah’s wagon and boosted her in. “I’ll be there as soon as
I can.”
“Tom!” Ellie grabbed Mina, who’d hopped in after, by the neck.
“Tom, wait!”
“I’ll be there,” he repeated, then ran to the lead wagon, crowded
with kids and dogs. Jayden was slinging a backpack to Kincaid, who
was settling a teary girl and admonishing a silky golden retriever that
kept trying to wash the girl’s face. “You guys got to roll,” Tom said.
“I hear that.” Kincaid leaned down and grasped Tom’s hand.
“Luck. Stay safe, son.”
“Right back atcha.” Tom offered a hand to Jayden. “Be careful.
Watch out for Ellie.”
“Watch her yourself.” Jayden surprised him by pulling Tom into
an embrace. “I never thanked you,” the boy said, roughly. “For, you
know . . .”
“It’s okay.” Tom gave the boy a squeeze. “Good luck.”
“Don’t be long?” Jayden clung to Tom’s forearms. “Stick with
Chris. He’s got a radio. I’ll keep mine on so you two know where to
find us. Don’t get any dumb, stupid ideas, Tom.”
Had Jayden read something in his face? “Don’t worry. Now go.”
Turning, he saw Chris, at Ellie’s wagon, reaching up to give the girl
a hug. Chris’s big black shepherd leapt nimbly alongside Mina and a
sleek Weimaraner Chris said had belonged to Alex. Seeing them all
together like that, knowing Ellie would be cared for and loved, made
Tom feel . . . a little easier.
Beyond, a large dray hitched to a third supply wagon was snorting,
picking up on the sudden urgency and eager to be off. Three other
boys—Aidan, Sam, and Greg—were already on their horses. Aidan
and Sam, who smelled like bad news, moved to take point, while
Greg waited to bring up the rear.
Please, God.
As Ellie’s wagon rumbled past, he raised a hand. He
thought Ellie shouted something, but her words were drowned by
the clop of horses’ hooves and the creak of wagons and the few
excited
huffs
of dogs.
Please, keep her safe.
In another moment, the moon hid its face, thick shadows swallowed the wagon, and Ellie was gone from him, again, lost to the
dark.

“How long are we going to stay here?” Cindi asked the guard. She
curled against Luke the way he remembered his cat used to:
warmthseeking behavior
, his mom called it. Luke used to hate how much that
cat shed, but now he really missed the dumb thing, not to mention
his parents. Slipping an arm around Cindi’s shoulders, he pulled her
a little closer. A half hour after Finn’s men and their Chuckies had
streamed into camp, two more men had trotted up, leading a mare.
When Luke spotted her and an ashen Chad astride the horse, he’d
made an idiot of himself, twisting away from Mellie and capturing
Cindi in a bear hug:
I thought you were dead, I thought you were dead!

“S’up to the boss,” the guard said, tipping coffee into a camp
mug. Half a smoke was glued to the guard’s lower lip. Exhaling a
gray jet, he sipped, sighed, pulled in another drag, and said, in a
strangled voice, “Wouldn’t mind some decent sleep when this is
done, though.”

“So we’re at Rule?” Luke waved away fumes. The way these guys
smoked, they should chew burnt logs and get over it already. This
particular old guard sported a ratty moustache so saturated with
nicotine it was dirty orange. “Are we staying here? What about the
kids in Rule?’

“You ask too many questions, you know that?” Turning away with
a lazy shrug, the mustachioed guard hooked a thumb under the carry
strap of his Uzi. “If I was you kids,” he said, sauntering toward a
much larger fire and the other three guards, all of them sucking cancer sticks, “I’d get some sleep instead of freezing your asses. Gonna
be light in about an hour.”

From his place opposite Luke, Chad muttered, “Yeah, well, it’s my
ass to freeze, butt-face.” Sighing, he stirred a steaming MRE, listlessly
chewed a mouthful of macaroni and cheese, then dropped the spoon
into the pouch. “Stomach’s too jumpy.”

To Chad’s left, Jasper piped up. “You going to finish that?”
“How can you
eat
?” Cindi asked.
“I’m hungry.” Jasper shoveled in a huge mouthful. “Too wired to

sleep,” he said, his voice clogged by cheesy noodles. “This has to be
it. I mean, he took all the Chuckies.” He gestured with the spoon to a
large stainless-steel animal cage, standing empty on a flatbed slotted
in with the other wagons. “Even those guys.”

“So if this is Rule,” Cindi said, “and those kids are still there, what
will they do with
us
now? Do you think they’ll . . . that they might . . .”
“No,” Luke said, and put both arms around her. He wanted to say
something movie-tough, like Finn’s guys would have to get through
him first, but the words just wouldn’t come.
“But we should make a move.” Chad tossed a look over his shoulder to check for the guards, then leaned closer. “We’re the three
oldest. There’s four of them, three of us.”
“Hey,” Jasper said around a mouthful of macaroni. “I’m here.”
“You’re ten. Keep eating.” Chad rolled his eyes. “If we can get
guns . . .”
“Yeah, well,
if
is a pretty big word right now,” Luke said.
“But we’re just sitting here.”
“I don’t see that we can do anything else.”
“I agree with Chad.” When Luke looked down at her, Cindi continued in a whisper, “Except for those guards, everyone else is gone.
We’ll probably never have a better shot.”
“And go where, Cindi?” Luke asked.
“Anywhere. Luke, we could raid the supply wagons, grab some
guns and food, and go.”
“Cindi, we have thirty kids. Us three and a couple other guys can
handle a gun, and that’s it. How would we move everyone and all the
stuff we need? We can’t outrun Finn.”
“But I don’t like waiting around for Finn to decide what happens
next.” Chad jerked his head at the transport cage. “You want to end
up in one of those?”
“No, I don’t,” Luke said to Chad. “But staying alive beats dying.”
“Not if we end up like Peter,” Jasper said.

After five days with Finn and his weird Chuckies, who were exactly
like the girl Tom had fought weeks ago, Luke had a queasy sense of
what was in store.

Peter was too old to be a Chucky, older than Tom for sure, by
a couple years. But his eyes were raving red, and God, he ate what
the Chuckies did: thawed slabs of frozen oldsters stacked like cordwood in a special Chucky chuck wagon. Which meant that Finn had
probably given Peter the same crap Tom figured someone fed those
Chuckies in white. Only it hadn’t worked on Peter, who spent half
his time in his cage screaming—
let me go, let me go, let me go go go
—and
the other half trying to get at Finn. Sometimes Finn hurt him pretty
bad. Never laid a hand on Peter, but wow, a couple seconds with Finn
and that creepy Davey, who followed Finn everywhere like a dog, and
Peter was moaning, howling, clutching his head.

“It’s like he hears something.” When Luke turned his gaze away
from the transport cage, Cindi said, “You know? When Peter starts
up with the
let me go
stuff ? But how? He’s only . . .
half
a Chucky, you
know?”

“Not all the time,” Luke said. “All this stuff, the
go go go
, that usually starts up whenever Finn moves out.”
“Telepathy?” Cindi asked.
“Can’t be straight telepathy.” Swallowing the last of the mac and
cheese, Jasper licked the plastic spoon. “At least, not like the movies
or what you’re thinking.”
“What else could it be? You were at the barn.” What had happened
when Finn’s Chuckies descended on their camp scared Luke silly:
how they broke formation, half going left and the rest like a marching band at halftime, streaming to the right. Then, the Chuckies had
done . . . nothing. Only waited, staring, their concentration utterly
complete. It was so quiet that Luke could hear the crackle of the
fire and the jangle of hardware as horses tossed their heads. It was
the weirdest thing, but Luke sensed that the Chuckies were being .
. . held back? Yes, they’d wanted him. They’d wanted Mellie. What
they’d most hungered after was all those juicy kids huddled in the
barn.
But they weren’t allowed. They were like . . . puppets?
That wasn’t
quite right. It was as if something or someone held them back on
invisible leashes:
this far and no farther.
“Yeah, but have you ever tried following your own thoughts? Real
complicated.” Smoothing the empty MRE pouch on his thighs, Jasper
began rolling the plastic into a tight tube. “Plus, you have the problem of signal strength and complexity.”
Luke and Cindi looked at each other. “What are you talking
about?” Luke asked.
“Thoughts are, you know, jumbly,” Jasper said.
“Okay. So?”
Jasper gave him a
duh-hello
look. “What does Peter do? Does he
talk about a
gazillion
things? No. He keeps saying the same thing over
and over again:
go, go, go, let me go
.”
“Yeah, but he’s crazy,” Chad said.
“Not all the time.” Jasper peered through the tube he’d made like
a pirate with a spyglass. “He’s worse when the Chuckies are on the
move. Other times, he’s normal.”
“He eats people,” Cindi said. “His eyes are weird.”
“Okay, not
normal
-normal, but not all Chucky either. Whenever
Finn
does
take him along, Peter’s either tied up or with a couple
guards.”
“Probably because Finn can’t control him very well?” Luke said.
“Or all the way, yeah. And the times Finn’s left him here? Peter’s
not as loud and crazy. He gets better the longer Finn’s gone. I think
it’s a cumulative exposure and distance thing, like, you know, Wi-Fi.”
Wuh?
“So?” Luke asked, and then as Jasper swiveled, still with the
tube to his eye, added, “Would you quit that? It’s annoying.”
“Fine.”
Jasper heaved a long-suffering sigh. “I don’t think Peter’s
saying
let me go
, like get me out of this cage so I can go home. He
might mean,
let me go go go after them
.
Go go go
is the command. Maybe
all Finn does are simple commands piggybacked on other signals.”
“I don’t even know what that means,” Cindi said.
“Yeah, the Chuckies aren’t radios,” Chad said.
Radios.
Luke turned that over.
Wi-Fi. Something important there . . .
something Jasper said about signal strength, not just distance but something
else.
“
Guys.
What do you think a thought is?” Jasper said. “Electrical
impulses, that’s all. The body’s full of electricity. You’ve got gradients
across your skin and ion flow in cells.”
“What?” Cindi said. “So how does that work in this situation?”
“Well, thoughts are chemical and electrical . . . I don’t know.”
Jasper’s shoulders rose and fell. “Look, I can’t tell you
how
Finn’s
doing it, but he can’t be slinging real complicated stuff around, or if
he is, only a couple Chuckies get the whole thing. Maybe even just
one Chucky.”
“Whoa. Wait a sec.” Cindi sat up. “He’s right. Two groups of
Chuckies, the ones in white . . .”
“And everybody else,” Chad said. “Like, maybe it doesn’t work
with every Chucky?”
“Or he doesn’t need a ton to get the job done,” Luke said. “But he’s
limited by distance, like when your Wi-Fi drops out when you’re too
far from a network.” He kept thinking:
signal strength; signal strength
and a network . . .
“Okay, I buy that. But . . .” Chad threw up his hands. “So what?
We’re still stuck.”
Luke didn’t see how this helped either, but his head felt like he’d
spent all night cramming for a test he was sure to bomb. Sometimes
when he walked away from a problem, the answer popped into his
head. “I’m going for water.” As he stood, all four guards perked up.
“Water,” he said, holding up his canteen and giving it a shake.
“Hold on.” Heaving to his feet, the mustachioed guard lumbered
over. A lit cigarette jutted from his mouth. “All right, let’s go,” he said,
handing over a flashlight.
“It’s not like I’m going to run anywhere,” Luke complained, but
the guard only grunted and made a
get going
gesture with the Uzi.
The stream was beyond the kids’ tents and a short distance into
the woods. Following his flashlight, Luke ducked into the trees,
where the light was worse and the shadows thicker. Ahead, he heard
the churn of water over stones. The final twenty feet to the stream
took a sharp drop. “I ain’t going down there. Bad for my knees. Make
it quick,” the guard said, as the orange coal of his smoke danced.
“Freezing my ass.”
Oh, bite me.
Carefully picking his way over stones and scrims of
ice, Luke fanned the light over the sparse snow along the stream’s
edge, looking for a safe spot where he wouldn’t wind up wet. As the
beam flickered past a splotch of slush, he spotted something that
only registered when his light had already skimmed past. Puzzled,
he turned the beam back and saw two things: snow heaped around a
rock where all the rest nearby were still covered, and a trio of animal
prints. Probably an animal had disturbed the snow as it stepped past.
From the prints, at first glance, he thought:
wolf
. Huge, too. That
print was bigger than his hand, and fresh. As in, not long ago.
Considering
that
, all of a sudden, he was glad for the guard and his
gun.
Make this quick is right.
The last thing he needed to run into was a
hungry wolf. He had enough problems. Heart pounding, he swiveled
right, dragging his light over a curving meander—and froze when
two green coins flared alongside the silver oval of a face.
The green eyes belonged to a honking
huge
gray-white wolf.
But the face belonged to a girl.